Globalisation and Europeanisation in Education: Quality, Equality and Democracy

This book grew out of the experience of a European Union Thematic Network of the same title, and focuses on aspects of the complex and varying relationships between globalisation, Europeanisation and education. The volume is divided into two parts: PART ONE: Governance and the Knowledge Economy, focuses on how the discourses of a Knowledge Economy and Lifelong Learning, and an emerging functional and scalar division of the labour of educational governance became central to the development of a European Education Space (EES). Contributors emphasise the role of the European Commission, and especially the Lisbon agenda, in this process, and consider the role of the Open Method of Coordination and the Bologna Process in the construction of the EES. A key theme linking Europeanisation to globalisation is the prominence of the discourse of competitiveness, and the role allocated to education in enhancing Europe's ability to compete with the United States and Japan. PART TWO: Citizenship, Identity and Language, looks at the emergence of a new social model for Europe, this time from the point of view of how it relates to the development of individual capacities and citizenship, and the role of intellectuals in this process. A second major theme is the place, role and choice of languages, and the impact of pressures from globalisation and Europeanisation, at national and sub-national levels, on language choice and teaching, taking into account both 'World Englishes' and Language Europe. Finally, globalisation becomes the central issue in an analysis of its different relationships with 'northern' (of which European education policy is taken as the example) and 'southern' paradigms of educational development.